Case studies

The Shropshire & Staffordshire Health Informatics Service (S&SHIS), is an NHS organisation which provides shared ICT infrastructure and services to many other NHS organisations within the region.

One of the biggest challenges which faces any organisation is building an effective and current reporting system of their IT asset estate.

Our approach to building a successful CMDB: we started off with what we call the “Foundation” classes, these are the base classes which almost every other class will have a relationship with; for us those were: “Location”, “Organisation” and “People”.

The quality of the data for these classes has to be from a reliable, current and managed data source. This was from an electronic staff record system, Active Directory and our in-house Service Management Tool. Federating this data and importing into the CMDBuild platform on a nightly basis, to ensure we have the most current data and the required attributes to satisfy our reporting requirements, was key to the start of our implementation.

Over the past 3 years we have developed the CMDBuild platform with automated feeds and manually managed classes, supported by internal business processes.

Currently there are 140 active users, 110.000 people records, 280 organisations, 1.300 locations and many other classes.

We have automated feeds for 21.000 live PC’s and Laptops with nightly updates showing key relationships including Owner (organisation class), Last Known User (people class), Last known Location (location class), Warranty End Dates (Dell warranty API).

We have sponsored the recent Document Management developments to include versioning features, which we use to manage our contracts and business critical policy and process documents.

The developments continue with many more on the horizon, and with the flexibility and features of the CMDBuild platform and Tecnoteca’s expertise this will continue to drive value for us and our partner organisations.